Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Seances

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Everybody hold hands! We're going for a seance!How long have we've been trying to talk to dead people for? And have we ever actually been speaking to the dead or just to somebody’s clicky toe joints?In today's episode Kate is joined by Lisa Morton, author of 'Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances', to talk about the long history of spiritualism, its believers and its fraudsters!Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code BETWIXTTHESHEETS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Is there anybody there? Can anyone hear me? Make yourself known to me. This is your fair do's warning. Today we're talking about seances. I thought I'd just get us into the mood there.

It's not the rudest one that we've ever had, so that should help some people. But we are talking about contacting the dead, which can be a bit of a tricky subject. And we're talking about people dying. And of course, I'll be swearing as well because I just, it's my podcast and I'll swear if I want to. Okay, the Twixters, we're going to conduct a seance. It's the spooky season, after all.

Maybe you want to call on somebody who you once knew. Maybe you want to contact the poltergeist who's been tormenting you as you sleep. What do we need to do here? Okay, first thing we need to do, we're going to gather some mates around a table. We're going to switch the lights off. I'm assuming like TV, radio, Siri, all of those things, they're off, I'll turn them off, turn them off.

We can light three candles. Can they be scented candles? If I was having a seance, they would be scented, they'd be jermalone. I'd have a very boosy seance. Focus, focus, right, okay. Everybody hold hands. Why are we holding hands?

Do we do that because we're making a circle or is it to stop people fudging this? Anyway, right, everyone's holding hands. Today, betwixt the sheets, we are going to try to find out how long we have been talking to dead people for and how long there have been people faking it. Why do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them for them. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Having conversations with dead people always seems to end badly in the movies. I have never had a conversation with a dead person, so I can't speak from experience, but it doesn't seem like a great idea.

But the history of people trying to do this is very long and very rich, and interest in seances and communing with the dead tends to fluctuate and surge after periods of huge loss or national traumas. But whether it's as simple as the medium researching their subject beforehand, or as weird as learning how to crack their toes so it sounds like ghosts in the wall. The ranks of spiritualists

have always included, well, one or two frauds. Today I'm talking to Halloween Queen, Lisa Morton, to find out about the long history of spiritualism and seances. It's believers, the disbelievers, and how the subject became a source of a significant rift between Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle. Are you ready? Can you hear me? Let's go. Welcome to Lisa Morton. How are you?

I am very good, Kate. Thanks for having me here. There is nobody that I would rather be talking to Halloween time than you because you studied the history of seances, which is fascinating. It is fascinating. And when I wrote my book calling The Spirits a History of Seances, it turned out to be more fascinating even than I had expected. I was so shocked at some of the stuff I found out. Really? Before we get to that, what brought you to this as a subject? What was it that made you go, this is what I want to research seances? I wish I could say it was like a lifelong obsession, but the truth is I was invited to write this book. An editor and a publisher I usually work with came to me and said, hey, We're thinking about doing a book on seances. Would you like to write that?

And, well, I already had a fair amount of the ground covered because I had written about ghosts, but it just seemed like a really fun subject. And it turned out it was way more fun than I had anticipated. Yeah. Oh, I love that. What was the most fun about it? I was really interested in the sort of spiritualist community that sprang up in both the U.S. and the UK during the late 19th century,

it was an incredible cast of characters and the scandals that went on and the way the mediums were selling themselves and continually being debunked and yet their followers never gave up on them. That was really interesting. Before we get there, and we will get there, because the Victorian seance boom

is truly something to behold. But I suppose the first question I've got to ask, is how far back does Seance go? And I suppose by Seance, it's not really like a belief in the afterlife. It's more a belief that you can speak to somebody in the afterlife. How far back does that practice go? Well, we have always thought we could communicate with the spirits of the dead. That goes all the way back in the epic of Gilgamesh.

Wow. He talks to his friend who's come back from the underworld. And we can look at Homer. And The Odyssey has an incredible scene where, Odysseus has to communicate with the spirits of the dead. And he starts off trying to call one spirit and gets a ton of them, including his mother, who he doesn't even know at the time has died. So this...

It's not always the way. Yeah. And this goes, of course, on into the Middle Ages when we get these crazy spell books, the grimoys that magicians thought they could use to call and bind spirits to them to do their bidding. And what's really cool, though, about the same thing. Seance in particular is that it is unique because before that, calling a spirit or communicating with a spirit was something you always did by yourself. You know, you would go out to the graveyard and you would sit on a tombstone and fall asleep and hope to dream about the spirit. The Greeks in

particular believed you could communicate with spirits by dreaming. And then as I mentioned earlier, you go into the Middle Ages with these magicians, solitary magicians. But in 1848, you get these two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, who think that they're talking to spirits and their isolated New York farmhouse, people become interested in it and they start gathering in groups to talk to spirits. And that's really the first time that that happened.

Had it been scary up to that point? Because the idea of talking to the dead, I mean, it's still, the stuff of horror movies, it's terrifying, the dead come back. But seances have this quite like, oh, it's like a nice little timeout for you and your mates. Like, it's a nice little activity to do. Before the 19th century, was it like a social activity at all, even if you by yourself, or was it something

demonic and scary? Both. We see the situations where it is something that's fairly somber and placid, but we do also get some of the scary ones. There was a legend from one of the Greek historians involving spending a night in an old building where they kept being visited by a specter in chains, and they had to call it up and find out why. And so some of them were scary. Some of the things, involving early necromancy, the magicians calling these things up are very weird and scary. And yes, as you mentioned earlier, one of the interesting things about the seance is people, I think nowadays, because of horror movies, think that a seance is going to be scary, that is not even close to how the 19th century Victorian saw them. For them, it was one part revivalist meeting,

one part party, and one part magic show. And if you read their accounts of, going to a seance at the time, say, around 1860, 1870, they would start with singing, they would join hands, they'd be in this room together, and they would often end the evening by saying that was the most wonderful night of my life. It's not exactly Hellraiser, is it? Right, yeah. It's like quite a nice evening out with your pals and some dead ones as well. All right, tell me about these sisters in New York.

What were they doing that made them think, oh, I think we're talking to Deadpies? people here. How did that even start? Kate and Maggie Fox were these two teenage girls, and they were living in this isolated farmhouse near Rochester, New York, and they started hearing thumps and weird sounds from all over this farmhouse. And they were living there with their parents. They had other brothers and sisters as well, but they had all moved out of the house. Kate and Maggie were the two youngest. So they start hearing these thumps, and they think it's spirits. And so they start like answering these thumps. They're thumping back. They're asking. questions. They're realizing, oh, wait, these things are knocking back when we ask questions.

So people start hearing about this. And within a few weeks, hundreds of people are showing up at this farmhouse to take part in these amazing things where the girls are now like sitting in the front room asking questions, knocks are coming from around the house and answer. Their sister Leah, their older sister who lived in Rochester, gets the idea that maybe there's money to be made with this. Well done Leah. Yeah. Leah is almost the villain in their story in some ways. But she brings them to live with her in Rochester, and she starts charging for the seances. And now you get the sort of classic form of the seance, a group of people who are sitting around a big table, Leah's dining table.

And the two girls, Kate and Maggie, are sitting at the head of the table and people are asking questions. And remarkable things seem to be happening. The knocks are sounding. The table is tilting and tipping up. which is where we get this phrase table wrapping or table tipping. And the girls become superstars. And within just a few years, they are touring the UK, the US. There are now hundreds of medium springing up everywhere. Some of them are becoming stars.

And they just become like the major celebrities of their day. If they were touring today, they would be filling like arenas, wouldn't they? It's like that's how big they became. It was this enormous global phenomenon, which when you think what you're talking about is actually a couple of teenagers going, oh, I had a knock. It just seems really strange that that so caught on the way it did. It does seem strange. And I think it's no surprise, though, that a lot of the superstar mediums were women. Because if you look at it, there weren't a lot of choices available to teenage girls like Kate and Maggie, circa 1850.

I mean, they were pretty much destined to be wives and mothers. And mediumship offered a very exciting alternative to that. So it seems fairly understandable to me that most of the big mediums were women because it offered a really fun alternative to what they were offered otherwise. That's fascinating, isn't it? It kind of creates a space for women to be more than just wives and just stay at home. No, now I can actually commune with the dead. Was it also more likely to be a woman because of this idea in the 19th century

that we still have echoes of today, that women are more emotional. So therefore, they're more susceptible to this. Yeah, I think so. I think that was certainly part of it. And there is an erotic element to this as well, which I don't think you can ignore. I'm so glad you said that, Lisa. I was going to get there. I was going to say, am I just really weird?

But there seems to be like this kind of writhing and, you know, something's possessed you, that there is something erotic to it. Well, there certainly is. And it's no surprise, I think, that many of the mediums were very attractive young women. And, I mean, you are sitting in a dark room. Everyone is pressed together tightly around a table. Their thighs are pressing. They're holding hands.

And they are experiencing something that they may believe is truly wondrous. So, yes, there was certainly that element to it. And it may have gone farther. There has been some suggestion that some of the mediums were probably offering more than mediumship to their clients. Really? Yeah. The most famous example of that is a young medium named Floyd. Lawrence Cook. She was in London and she was a teenager and she was obviously very gifted at,

I suspect, fraud. She was probably very charismatic. Her big thing was that she was able to produce a full body apparition who was supposed to be her spirit guide named Katie King. And the way that Florence's seances would work was that everyone would sit around the table, the lights would go down, they would sing. And there was a thing, the room called a spirit cabinet. Now, this would either be just a curtained off area of the room or another room, something like that. And at some point, Florence would get up, leave the seance, go into this spirit cabinet where no one could see what she was doing. And then as the seance, yeah, right, as the seance progressed, Katie King would suddenly appear. Katie King happened

to look miraculously like Florence, which didn't seem to bother the true believers at the time, one of spiritualism's great mysteries, how people continued to want to believe this. But Florence was investigated by a man named William Crooks, and William Crooks was one of the leading scientist of his day. He would go on to be knighted for his contributions to science. He was also an ardent spiritualist, and he would test many of the big mediums and almost always confirm their abilities. He absolutely believed, even though he was testing them that they were doing this. He brought Florence. into his house and tested her. I bet he did.

He tested her for six months while she lived with him, his wife, and their six children. And part of his testing of Florence included photographing. And so there are many photographs that we still have that show this figure, the supposedly Katie King's spirit. She's all draped in white. She's get a big white headdress on. there's even one of him arm and arm with Katie King. Now, years later, someone who knew Florence said that she had confessed to him that she was having an affair with crooks.

And that certainly makes sense because it's hard to imagine this tremendously intelligent man of science putting his reputation on the line because he did to say that she was a real medium. And he was challenged by every major scientist in the UK at the time. He persisted in believing that. He kind of shut up about it after a while and didn't really talk about it much more. And his reputation survived. Florence went on to continue being a medium. She had several sponsors who kept her in money. So it had, I guess, a happy ending despite the fact that they probably were having a six-month-long affair in his own house.

That's quite shocking, isn't it? Do you think that he knew that she was a complete fake and just went, well, I'm in now and just decided that he would, because he was having an affair with her, that he would kind of boost her reputation? Or do you think it was, was it like a blackmail thing where she was like, yeah, I'm a fake, but we're also having sex, so you better say that I'm the real deal. I think there's a third alternative, which is the possibility that he actually really believed that this was a spirit. Really? And I think it may have been a little bit of a case of, he certainly knew he was having sex with Florence, but I think there may have been.

in this immense attraction to the idea that she was this medium who was producing this spirit that he really believed in. And, you know, with someone like crooks, you've got to figure there must have been a part of him going, this is all nonsense. But you must have been. But you can convince yourself of anything, can you? You can convince yourself of all kinds of, convincing yourself that you're having sex with the ghost guide of your teenage lover. That's quite a stretch. But apparently that happened. That's what? Wow. Okay. Take me back to the Fox sisters before we get to Florence and doing some rapping of her own. But what were they doing? So they started off in their own house and then they moved with their sister Leah. So the house isn't haunted. It's them. But what were they doing? They said that they were like rapping. What is that? What is rapping that mediums were doing? It's not like Eminem and not like that. Right. It was these sounds, these knockings that were coming from around them during the seance. And they eventually confessed to how they did it.

They had an uncanny ability to crack their toes in a way that was very loud. And they could crack their toe knuckles so loud that people in an auditorium could hear it. And it was certainly a very strange sound. So what they are doing in seances is during the dark, they are pulling their shoes off and making these very loud cracks with their toes. Now, they're still holding the hands of people next. to them. So, of course, people are going, oh, no, no, it's not them making those sounds. Eventually, of course, moved even farther into their sort of mediumship. They did get wealthy sponsors for a time. They were very celebrated. They had money. Katie ended up moving to the

UK marrying a wealthy man and had two children with him, but they did not have a happy ending, like maybe Florence and William Crooks. In 1888, they confessed that everything they had done was fraud. They confessed it in both newspaper articles and in a live lecture tour. And they ended up dying not long after that, both Katie and Maggie. Katie died very specifically in poverty and of alcoholism and left the two children and Maggie died not long after, also essentially impoverished and of alcoholism. And so their lives end up being somewhat tragic, yeah. Oh, that's sad. Why did they confess? Why at that late stage, did they go, or it's all been a fake? Maggie was the first one who confessed. And the reason that Maggie confessed was that she had fallen madly in love with a man who was a famous explorer. And this had happened many years before 1888, but he was deeply Catholic and wanted nothing to do with her. And she had pined for him ever since. In fact, she even took his name as hers and so forth. And that was part of it.

And then also in 1888, there was a very famous case that was happening in the New York newspapers involving a fraudulent medium. And they didn't want to be associated with that in any way. So that was when Maggie came out and confessed everything. It's also, of course, entirely possible that she was drunk when she did it. Oh, Maggie. Oh, dear. Yeah. That's unfortunate. Has the toe clicking?

Has that ever been replicated by anyone? Are there people out there that can click their toes so loudly that people would think it was a ghost in the wall? I don't know of anyone else doing that. And in fact, there was no one else in the Fox family who could do it. A couple of the brothers and sisters were like, well, great-aunt Gertie or somebody could do it, but I can't. It's a completely genetic thing, I guess. It must be. I mean, that's got to be loud, really loud.

And they were discovered doing it in 1855, not long as. After they had been touring and had become very popular, they agreed to sit for a team of scientists who very clearly watched them do this and said, well, this is how they're doing it. And again, it didn't matter. No one bothered, yeah. Oh, that's kind of sad that they had this sort of weird gift of clicking toes

and it all just kind of went horrible. It's just so random and weird. I'll be back with Lisa after this short break. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? Well, you can expect all of this and more from the ancients on History Heat. Join us twice a week every week as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past.

Subscribe to the ancients wherever you get your podcast. All right, so tell me about some of the other really famous spiritualists because it really started to kick off in the sort of mid-19th century, which is fascinating really when you think that the Victorians are known for being, there was huge advances in science and medicine and technology, but also at the same time, there was loads of people going, oh, ghosts. It seems like really counterintuitive, doesn't it? It does, and it doesn't.

Because if you look at it, you're right, that it is during a time when the Industrial Revolution is bringing all these factories and new science and new ways of transporting things and so forth. And during a sort of gigantic upheaval like that, people may need to cling to something that is outside of our world, that is more spiritual. And before spiritualism came along, people had been kind of leaning in that direction with some other odd beliefs. Mesmerism was a big one. And mesmerism was much more than just being hypnotized, which is how we now think of mesmerism. At the time, it was a whole belief that involved gathering in groups for big healings and all kinds of odd things. But it faded quickly

when spiritualism came along, because spiritualism was much more exciting and much more interesting. And spiritualism really took off about 1855, which is by now there are many mediums in the field who are following in the footsteps of the Fox sisters. And there are spiritualist churches and spiritualist newspapers. There was a spiritualist bookstore in London. There are spiritualist organizations. And it is really booming at that point. And that's when you get a lot of the big mediums coming in.

The most famous of all the Victorian mediums was actually a man. It was a Scottish American man named Daniel Douglas Hume. And Mr. Hume was apparently very charismatic and very good at what he did. And he was another one who did things with his feet, although he didn't crack his toes. He had special shoes built, apparently, according to some witnesses. And he would slide his feet out of the shoes and touch people under the table during the seance and say, and say, those are spirit hands touching you. But Hume was also...

Oh, God bless, they are not you. Dirty monkey. You're not the only one. to say that, by the way, Robert Browning, the great poet, attended a seance with his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and did not find Hume even remotely convincing and wrote a very long poem about him called Mr. Sludge, the medium. Oh, dear. He really did not like him at all.

But Hume was said to have some very strange abilities as well. People said he could lengthen his body. And here again, apparently we have someone who was good at maybe dislocating their shoulders, that kind of thing to make it look like he was growing or lengthening his body. And another trick of his was levitation. He was very famous for an event that took place in called the Ashley House levitation. He was at the time staying with a British lord who had several of his friends over for a seance, during which they claimed that they all saw hume levitate out of his chair, float out of, the third-story window, float in through another window in another room and sit back down in his chair. And this actually is one of the most famous events of 19th century spiritualism. It has been argued and debated for over 100 years now. People are still arguing about how they think it was done. And one of the things that they think that Hume probably learned how to do and do very well was during the seance, the lights have gone down, you're in a very, very dimly lit room.

He has removed his shoes and he would pull his legs up into the chair, stand up slowly. And in the darkness, all you see is this part of him rising. And he's talking throughout. He was probably very good at that. I'm floating. I'm rising. I'm rising. And then he might also have a telescoping rod that had a pencil attached to the end of it,

that he would hold up and mark the ceiling. And then later on when they would turn on the lights, he would point to the mark and say, well, there's proof. I made that while I was floating. Wow. That, I mean, it's hard to know what to make of it, isn't it, without seeing it? I'm sure if we saw it today, there'd be magicians and all kinds of people that can go, this is definitely how it happened. But you listen to something like that.

And we're talking about people that, you know, if they hear teenage girls making knocks and clicks with their feet, that then I go, oh, it's the afterlife. See, you listen to some of this stuff and you think, they must have been daft. They must have been like really easily fooled. But that's not true. If lots of people saw this, he must have done something convincing. One of my favorite arguments to explain how the spiritualist would persist in their belief, there was a case that took place in Boston where there were two rival mediums. And rival mediums, there are a lot of cases of that.

Two mediums who would in particular have this. rivalry going on at competition. And in this case, in Boston, one of the women said, no, my rival is a fake. And I can do everything that she can do. And I'll prove it to you that she's a fake by doing what she does. Now, you would think the response from the spiritualist community would be, okay, show us. The response was so logic twisting. It just, it hurt your brain to even try and parse it. It boiled down to, well, we know that your rival is real. So if you can do it, everything that she can do, that means that you're real too and you're lying about being a fake. Oh my God. That's just, it's almost like cult mentality. Like when somebody's so invested in a

belief that they will twist anything to preserve that. I mean, that is some mental gymnastics, isn't it? They could have just done anything by that point and these people would still still believe. But it wasn't wholesale belief, was it? It wasn't that they would do, oh, there's a knock on the wall, or it's actually motos or Hume floating around his house. There were skeptics with this huge boom of spiritualism. There's always been people going, no, no, that's just nonsense. Oh, yeah. We mentioned Robert Browning, but magicians were often involved with debunking the spiritualists because magicians were using the same kind of paraphernalia and tricks and charisma misdirecting the audience. During the 19th century, there was a very popular British magician

named Jan Maskelyne. And he repeated... Good name. It is. I would love to see a performance of his, but of course there's nothing that exists because he predated film. And he debunked some of the big spiritualists, but he lost a huge court case. There was a medium that he had tried to debunk who went by the name Reverend Monk. And a believer of Reverend Monks sued masculine for slander and libel and defamation and so forth. And it was a fairly substantial amount. I think it was like 10,000 pounds, of course, which at the time was immense. And so this goes to court. And Maskeland says to the jury, no, look, I'll do everything that he did. I'll prove it to you. So he brings the jury to one of his performances. And the particular trick in question was that Reverend Monk had been able to exude

ectoplasm from himself. And ectoplasm was thought to be this matter that was a spiritual, sort of ethereal matter that mediums might exude during a seance. And it usually looked like a filmy, milky white substance. Monk would exude it from his torso during a seance and then would pull it back in. So, Maskeland does this on stage for the jury. and you would think, okay, open and shut case. Well, by the time the jury gets back to the courtroom, the attorneys say, well, there's just one problem.

You demonstrated how you exuded it. You didn't demonstrate how he pulls it back in. No. And he lost the case. He had to pay up. Yeah. So, yeah, ectoplasm is his own whole other thing. And I have a favorite medium in terms of ectoplasm, who is actually in the 20th century.

and a woman named Helen Duncan. Helen Duncan is my favorite medium, actually. All right, Helen Duncan, here we go. Helen Duncan was very famous in 1944. She went to trial for supposedly being caught during a seance outside of London, exuding ectoplasm. She was arrested. Now, there were some really strange things surrounding this arrest.

It was supposedly she was arrested because, hey, there were a lot of mediums doing this kind of thing. They went after her because she had held a seance a couple of years earlier in which she had correctly identified a British battleship that had just been sunk in the war. This is all during World War II. Oh. And no one was supposed to know yet that this ship had just sunk. And there happened to be a member of British intelligence in her seance that day who came

back and reported that. So she was on their watch list because of that. and they kind of were going after her, and it took him a few years to finally get her. But when they tried to arrest her, they couldn't, oddly enough, they didn't get any of the ectoplasm. And so they took it to trial anyways. This became the biggest sensation in 1944. It was so huge that it took over even the war reporting. It made Winston Churchill really angry. I bet it did.

Churchill was saying to his ministers, why is this silly trial more important than our war? news, and she was arrested under a 1735 witchcraft law because they couldn't figure out what other way to arrest her. She was tried as a witch? She was tried under a witchcraft law, which of course is crazy, and even Churchill was deeply embarrassed by that, apparently. And Helen Duncan had an ability that I think is even more amazing than cracking your toe knuckle. She apparently, her way of producing ectoplasm was that She would sit in one of these seances. Again, you're in a darkened room, and so you're not seeing things clearly. But you're watching this woman sitting over here who this white, filmy matter is flowing out of her.

And sometimes there even seem to be faces in it. Well, she would do that by, before she went into a seance, she would swallow a length of cheesecloth. And sometimes she would cut photos of faces out of magazines and swallow that with the cheesecloth. What? She had an ability to regurgitate at will, which to me sounds just just... Helen! Oh! So Helen could sit in a darkened room and bring this stuff up, and it looks very convincing until you put a light on it, of course. So this is all part of her trial. And one of the interesting things was that during her trial, because the judge kept saying, no, I'm not going to

let you produce your spirit guide here for the jury. No. Her defense, her defense, Fence ended up resting on producing dozens and dozens and dozens of witnesses who had been to her seances, who talked about how accurate the information was that she gave, how much they got out of them. That was really interesting. She was still found guilty. She was sentenced to the maximum time of six months in prison, which she did. And they did, of course, change those witchcraft laws after that. And they actually did put it in place instead a fraudulent medium law. So, oh, that's interesting. So why wasn't she just convicted under suspected espionage? I mean, that seems to be what they were actually going after, doesn't it?

It does. And I think they just couldn't make a real case, especially with someone who had supposedly come upon this information via occult means. And there again, that is one of those things where people are still not entirely sure what happened there. There was some suggestion that she might have had a client. who had a young son or a brother who had died on the ship who did find out early. Wow.

So who busted the fact that she was just eating a tablecloth and then vomiting it back up again? Did she confess that? Or did, how did they find that out? There was a very famous investigator in the 20th century named Harry Price. And Harry Price was one of the leading ghostbusters of his day. He worked sometimes with the Society for Psychical Research, which is still a very famous organization in both Britain and America. And he was the one who tested her and he took her into a laboratory setting

and he put her in a chair and turned out the lights, let her do her thing and then turn the lights on during the middle of it. Busted. So busted, yeah. So they caught her sitting there with this white cheesecloth dangling out of her mouth. So horrible. But that was taking place in a Second World War. and I did read somewhere that after the First World War in particular,

there was another big boom in psychics. And I guess that makes sense, doesn't it? Because so many people died that you would want to make contact. And that Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, was a huge medium proponent because he lost his son in the First World War. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. And it boomed also after the American Civil War in 1865.

And in fact, it has, we've seen a service. in paranormal belief after every major global calamity or big event. When we went into lockdown for COVID at the beginning of 2020, I actually predicted a big spike in paranormal belief, and it turned out I was right there. Wow. So yeah, it is something that when people experience some kind of mass trauma, they turn to this, especially if the mass trauma involves losing loved ones in a way that you didn't get to see them. You don't have the closure. During both the Civil War and World War I, in particular, there was also that thing where you may not even be sure your son or your brother or your husband was dead because they simply didn't know in some of the big battles. And so being

able to possibly communicate with their spirits could offer some real solace to these grieving families. Yeah. Wow. Tell me about Arthur Conan Doyle. When literally scholars study Arthur Conan Doyle, there's this tendency to go, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes. And then we kind of get to his later writing and everyone just kind of goes, we're just not going to talk about that. We're just going to be a bit quiet about that one. Because suddenly he was about fairies and he was about ghosts and goblins. And this person who wrote Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Science himself, again, it seems so incongruous trying to fit these two things together. But he was a big proponent of mediums.

He sure was. And he, it's also interesting because he, he was a medical doctor. So here's a guy who is steeped in medicine and science and logic. And yes, became one of the biggest proponents of spiritualism in the 20th century. He wrote books on it. He traveled doing lecture tours on it. And one of my favorite relationships in all of the history of seance is his relationship with Houdini, the great magician. They had a spectacular and very strange and finally kind of tragic relationship. They started as great friends. They were admirers of each other's work. Houdini in particular loved authors. He had his own personal library in his New York home. He loved corresponding with Conan Doyle. He actually had a special little velvet-lined wooden box

that he kept Conan Doyle's letters in. And they were really, really good friends. And their families were friendly and so forth. But then in the, I think it's 1922, the summer of 1922, they are vacationing together. And at that point, Conan Doyle's wife has taken up mediumship. And he says to Houdini, one afternoon, she wants you to come up for a seance. And so Houdini goes along with it. So it's, I guess the three of them. Houdini's wife, for some reason, wasn't there, but it was Conan Doyle, his wife, and Houdini. And Conan Doyle's wife practiced a form of mediumship called automatic writing, which is where you supposedly enter a trans state and let the spirit use your hand to write messages. Okay.

She produced something like 21 pages that were purportedly from Houdini's mother. Now, Houdini was obsessed with his mother. He always referred to her as my sainted mother. He, much of his life was really dedicated to his mother. He was, he was, furious because he took one look at the pages, said, my mother didn't speak a word of English. The pages, of course, are all in English. Busted. It severed their friendship. And they became bitter enemies after that. Houdini put out a book in 1924 called A Magician Among the Spirits.

And it was his debunking Bible. And he sent a copy to Conan Doyle. Well, and then Conan Doyle scrawled across the title. page a malicious book. Oh, that's it. It's vicious. Yeah, who is it? It was really vicious. And it reached the point where they might be doing lecture tours at the same cities like a night apart. So there's Conan Doyle in this theater one night going on about the value of spiritualism and how it's all true. And then

the next night, here's Houdini coming in going, no, it's all crap and I'll show you how it's done. Wow. I mean, in Houdini's defence, not that he needs one, but if you went to stay with your friend and then his wife suddenly produced a letter from your dead mother, that would make me quite cross as well, I think. Yeah, absolutely. No question. No.

But then I suppose if Conan Dole really thinks that this is, but this is a nice letter from your mother, how could you possibly be that angry about, oh, it's so bizarre, isn't it? So have you been to mediums and seances? presumably in the course of research in your book, you must have done. I do know some mediums. I unfortunately haven't been to a really good seance because I had some scheduled to go to in early 2020 and the pandemic hit. And so I didn't get to follow through and...

Didn't see that come in. Yeah, I didn't get to follow through and go to them. What I have done is a number of paranormal investigations, which are almost our modern seance in a way. Okay. And I have had one genuinely startling. thing happen at one of those that is one of those things that kind of shakes your skepticism a little bit makes you wonder, well, even if I imagine that, that's pretty amazing. But it was at a place in

Colorado called the Stanley Hotel, which is famously haunted. It inspired Stephen King to write the Shining. It's way up in the mountains in a tiny little place called Estes Park and very supposedly very haunted. Old building built around the turn of the last century, gorgeous, gigantic. And one of the most haunted places that the Stanley is thought to be an outbuilding that was a concert hall. And they have a number of very particular spirits who they think haunt the concert hall, including Mr. and Mrs. Stanley themselves. And we were in the concert hall. It was October.

It was three in the morning. It was very cold. Wind is howling outside. And we were using a device called a spirit box. And this is a little thing about this big. And what it is is it scans radio frequency. rapidly. So it creates this sound that's like a wash of white noise and every once in while a word will come through. And the theory is that spirits are using the electromagnetic

frequencies to communicate. Now, of course, the reality is that the words are probably a little bit of spoken disc jockey banter that has pierced the white noise somehow. But we were using a spirit box and nothing had been going on much for about 20 minutes and it suddenly word blurted out this word that sounded like mostylaria. Now, most people are not going to know what that is. I know because at the time I was researching my book on the history of ghost, that is the Latin name of a play called The Haunted House. So to hear that word come out of this box at three in the morning in a haunted hotel was really strange. Now, of course, my skeptical brain is saying, Oh, it probably was a disc jockey saying something like most of the Lariats or something.

I, you know, I don't know. But it was, that was startling. But I have also been in rooms with mediums who reported things that I'm not sure how they could have known. So I am a very open-minded skeptic. I don't know what's going on, but I know something's going on. Do you know, that's kind of where I am as well. It's like my official party line is like, of course I don't believe in it. Of course.

But then I also know loads of really rational, sane people who will say to me, well, I don't believe in ghosts either, but this happened. Right. And then it's kind of like, oh, that is a bit strange, isn't it? If somebody was going to go to a seance or a medium for the first time, what would you sort of recommend that they do to prep for it? Is it just something that you can just barrel into that's a bit of a laugh? Or is there something, some kind of research that you should do beforehand? If anyone's listening to this and thinks, I'm going to go to a seance. I would say just research your medium a little bit and see what.

and see what people are saying about the medium and see, you know, because you don't want to end up with one of those sort of people who will do the, oh, for another $30, I can produce Aunt Gertie for you, you know. But yeah, just see what people are saying and do your research on the medium. Absolutely. And we don't need a spiritualist medium to find out more about you. And if people have listened to them and want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? That's easy. I'm at Lisa Morton.com. From there they can follow links to my social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatever.

Lisa, you have been so much fun to talk to. Thank you so much for joining me, betwixt the sheets today. Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. This was fun. Thanks for listening. It was amazing to be able to catch up with Lisa in what must be her busiest season. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you were listening to us from Beyond the Vale, I don't know if you can like and review.

podcasts from the spirit world, but if you can, please do that as well. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit.